Truly language was invented to travesty the truth, and when French politicians say they are going to the right it is an almost sure sign that they are going to the left; nevertheless, is it possible to blame the Italians who read in these assurances a positive promise affecting their own case?

The same assurances were repeated again and again through the winter of 1830-31; they were repeated authoritatively as late as March in the latter year. Well may a French writer inquire: 'Was it insanity or treachery?'

The good tidings were published by the Italian exiles, who, living close to the great centres of European politics, were the first to intoxicate themselves with the great delusion. From London, Gabriele Rossetti sent the exultant summons:

Cingi l'elmo, la mitra deponi, O vetusta Signora del mondo: Sorgi, sorgi dal sonno profondo, Io son l'alba del nuovo tuo di.

Saran rotte le vostre catene, O Fratelli che in ceppi languite; O Fratelli che il giogo soffrite Calcherete quel giogo col pie.

The child beside whose cradle the ode was written, was to grow to manhood while Italy still remained 'the weeping, desolate mother.' The cry of the poet was not, however, without an echo. In 1831, Romagna, Parma and Modena rose in rebellion.

Things had been going, without much variation, from bad to worse in the Roman states, ever since 1815. Pius VII. (Chiaramonti), who died in 1823, was succeeded by Leo XII. (Genga), an old man who was in such enfeebled health that his death was expected at the time of his election, but, like a more famous pontiff, he made a sudden recovery, which was attributed to the act of a prelate, who, in prayer, offered his own life for the Pope's, and who died a few days after resolving on the sacrifice. During this Pope's reign, the smallpox was rife in Rome, in consequence of the suppression of public vaccination. The next conclave, held in 1829, resulted in the election of Pius VIII. (Castiglioni da Cingoli), who died on the 30th of November 1830, and was followed by Gregory XVI. (Cappellari). In each conclave, Austria had secured the choice of a 'Zealot,' as the party afterwards called Ultramontane was then designated. The last traces of reforms introduced by the French disappeared; criminal justice was again administered in secret; the police were arbitrary and irresponsible. All over the Roman states, but especially in Romagna, the secret society of the Sanfedesti flourished exceedingly; whether, as is probable, an offshoot of the Calderai or of indigenous growth, its aims were the same. The affiliated swore to spill the last drop of the blood of the Liberals, without regard to sex or rank, and to spare neither children nor old men. Many Romagnols had left their country after the abortive agitation of 1821, and amongst these were the Gambas. Count Pietro died in Greece, where he had gone on the service of freedom. Had he lived, this young man would have been sure to win a fair name in the annals of Italian patriotism; he should not, as it is, be quite forgotten, as it was chiefly due to him that Byron's life took the redeeming direction which led to Missolonghi.

In February 1831, Romagna and the Marches of Ancona threw off the Papal Government with an ease which must have surprised the most sanguine. The white, red and green tricolor was hoisted at Bologna, where, as far as is known, this combination of colours first became a political badge. Thirty-six years before Luigi Zamboni and Gian Battista De Rolandis of Bologna had distributed rosettes of white, red and green ribbon; Zamboni was arrested, and strangled himself, afraid of betraying his friends; De Rolandis was hung on the 23rd of April 1796. Such was the origin of the flag, but, until 1831, the Carbonaro red, blue and black was the common standard of the revolution. From that year forth, the destinies of Italy were accomplished under the colours of better augury, so fit to recall her fiery volcanoes, her wooded Apennines, her snow-crowned Alps; colours which in one sense she receives from Dante, who clothes in them the vision of the glorified Beatrice.

The rising at Parma requires but little comment. The Empress Marie-Louise neither hated her subjects, nor was hated by them, but her engagements with Austria prevented her from granting the demanded concessions, and she abandoned her state, to return to it, indeed, under Austrian protection, but without the odious corollary of vindictive measures which was generally meant by a restoration.

Much more important is the history of the Modenese revolution. Apologists have been found for the Bourbons of Naples, but, if anyone ever said a good word for Francesco d'Este, it has escaped the notice of the present writer. Under a despotism without laws (for the edicts of the Prince daily overrode the Este statute book which was supposed to be in force), Modena was far more in the power of the priests, or rather of the Jesuits, than any portion of the states of the Church. Squint-eyed, crooked in mind and bloodthirsty, Francis was as ideal a bogey-tyrant as can be discovered outside fiction. In 1822, he hung the priest Giuseppe Andreoli on the charge of Carbonarism; and his theory of justice is amusingly illustrated by the story of his sending in a bill to Sir Anthony Panizzi—who had escaped to England—for the expenses of hanging him in effigy.

Francis felt deeply annoyed by the narrow limits of his dominions, and his annoyance did not decrease with the decreasing chances of his ousting the Prince of Carignano from the Sardinian throne. He was intensely ambitious, and one of his subjects, a man, in other respects, of high intelligence, thought that his ambition could be turned to account for Italy. It was the mistake over again that Machiavelli had made with Cesare Borgia.

Ciro Menotti, who conceived the plan of uniting Italy under the Duke of Modena, was a Modenese landed proprietor who had exerted himself to promote the industry of straw-plaiting, and the other branches of commerce likely to be of advantage to an agricultural population. He was known as a sound philanthropist, an excellent husband and father, a model member of society. Francis professed to take an interest in industrial matters; Menotti, therefore, easily gained access to his person. In all the negotiations that followed, the Modenese patriot was supported and encouraged by a certain Dr Misley, who was of English extraction, with whom the Duke seems to have been on familiar terms. It appears not doubtful that Menotti was led to believe that his political views were regarded with favour, and that he also received the royal promise that, whatever happened, his life would be safe. This promise was given because he had the opportunity of saving the Duke from some great peril—probably from assassination, though the particulars were never divulged.

Misley went to Paris to concert with the Italian committee which had its seat there; the movement in Modena was fixed for the first days of February. But spies got information of the preparations, and on the evening of the 3rd, before anything had been done, Menotti's house was surrounded by troops, and after defending it, with the help of his friends, for two hours, he was wounded and captured. Next day the Duke despatched the following note to the Governor of Reggio-Emilia: 'A terrible conspiracy against me has broken out. The conspirators are in my hands. Send me the hangman.—Francis.'

Not all, however, of the conspirators were in his hands; the movement matured, in spite of the seizure of Menotti, and Francis, 'the first captain in the world,' as he made his troops call him, was so overcome with fright that on the 5th of February he left Modena with his family, under a strong military escort, dragging after him Giro Menotti, who, when Mantua was reached, was consigned to an Austrian fortress.

Meanwhile, the revolution triumphed. Modena chose one of her citizens as dictator, Biagio Nardi, who issued a proclamation in which the words 'Italy is one; the Italian nation is one sole nation,' testified that the great lesson which Menotti had sought to teach had not fallen on unfruitful ground. Wild as were the methods by which, for a moment, he sought to gain his end, his insistance on unity nevertheless gives Menotti the right to be considered the true precursor of Mazzini in the Italian Revolution.

Now that the testing-time was come, France threw to the winds the principle announced in her name with such solemn emphasis. 'Precious French blood should never be shed except on behalf of French interests,' said Casimir Perier, the new President of the Council. A month after the flight of the Duke of Modena, the inevitable Austrians marched into his state to win it back for him. The hastily-organised little army of the new government was commanded by General Zucchi, an old general of Napoleon, who, when Lombardy passed to Austria, had entered the Austrian service. He now offered his sword to the Dictator of Modena, who accepted it, but there was little to be done save to retire with honour before the 6000 Austrians. Zucchi capitulated at Ancona to Cardinal Benvenuti, the Papal delegate. Those of the volunteers who desired it were furnished with regular passports, and authorised to take ship for any foreign port. The most compromised availed themselves of this arrangement, but the vessel which was to bear Zucchi and 103 others to Marseilles, was captured by the Austrian Admiral Bandiera, by whom its passengers were kidnapped and thrown into Venetian prisons, where they were kept till the end of May 1832. This act of piracy was chiefly performed with a view to getting possession of General Zucchi, who was tried as a deserter, and condemned to twenty years' imprisonment. Among the prisoners was the young wife of Captain Silvestro Castiglioni of Modena. 'Go, do your duty as a citizen,' she had said, when her husband left her to join the insurrection. 'Do not betray it for me, as perhaps it would make me love you less.' She shared his imprisonment, but just at the moment of the release, she died from the hardships endured.

By the end of the month of March, the Austrians had restored Romagna to the Pope, and Modena to Francis IV. In Romagna the amnesty published by Cardinal Benvenuti was revoked, but there were no executions; this was not the case in Modena. The Duke brought back Ciro Menotti attached to his triumphal car, and when he felt that all danger was past, and that the presence of the Austrians was a guarantee against a popular expression of anger, he had him hung.

'When my children are grown up, let them know how well I loved my country,' Menotti wrote to his wife on the morning of his execution. The letter was intercepted, and only delivered to his family in 1848. The revolutionists found it in the archives of Modena. On the scaffold he recalled how he was once the means of saving the Duke's life, and added that he pardoned his murderer, and prayed that his blood might not fall upon his head.

During the insurrection in Romagna, an event occurred which was not without importance to Europe, though it passed almost unnoticed at the time. The eldest son of Queen Hortense died in her arms at Forli, of a neglected attack of measles; some said of poison, but the report was unfounded. He and his brother Louis, who had been closely mixed up with Italian conspiracies for more than a year, went to Romagna to offer their services as volunteers in the national army. By the death of the elder of the two, Louis Napoleon became heir to what seemed then the shadowy sovereignty of the Buonapartes.

No sooner had the Austrians retired from the Legations in July 1831, than the revolution broke out again. Many things had been promised, nothing performed; disaffection was universal, anarchy became chronic, and was increased by the indiscipline of the Papal troops that were sent to put it down. The Austrians returned and the French occupied Ancona, much to the Pope's displeasure, and not one whit to the advantage of the Liberals. This dual foreign occupation of the Papal states lasted till the winter of 1838.



CHAPTER IV

'YOUNG ITALY' 1831-1844

Accession of Charles Albert—Mazzini's Unitarian Propaganda—The Brothers Bandiera.

On 27 April 1831, Charles Albert came to the throne he had so nearly lost. His reconciliation with his uncle, Charles Felix, had been effected after long and melancholy preliminaries. To wash off the Liberal sins of his youth, or possibly with a vague hope of finding an escape from his false position in a soldier's death, he joined the Duc d'Angouleme's expedition against the Spanish Constitutionalists. His extraordinary daring in the assault of the Trocadero caused him to be the hero of the hour when he returned with the army to Paris; but the King of Sardinia still refused to receive him with favour—a sufficiently icy favour when it was granted—until he signed an engagement, which remained secret, to preserve intact during his reign the laws and principles of government which he found in force at his accession. If there had been an Order of the Millstone, Charles Felix would doubtless have conferred it upon his dutiful nephew; failing that, he presented to him for signature this wonderful document, the invention of which he owed to Prince Metternich. At the Congress of Verona in 1822, Charles Albert's claims to the succession were recognised, thanks chiefly to the Duke of Wellington, who represented England in place of Lord Londonderry (Castlereagh), that statesman having committed suicide just as he was starting for Verona. Prince Metternich then proposed that the Prince of Carignano should be called upon to enter into an agreement identical with the compact he was brought to sign a couple of years later. In communicating the proposal to Canning, the Duke of Wellington wrote that he had demonstrated to Prince Metternich 'the fatality of such an arrangement,' but that he did not think that he had made the slightest impression on him. So the event proved; baffled for the moment, the Prince managed to put his plan in execution through a surer channel.

With the accession of Charles Albert appears upon the political scene a great actor in the Liberation of Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini. Young and unknown, except for a vague reputation for restlessness and for talent which caused the government of Charles Felix to imprison him for six or seven months at Savona, Mazzini proposed to the new King the terms on which he might keep his throne, as calmly as Metternich had proposed to him the terms on which he might ascend it. The contrast is striking; on the one side the statesman, who still commanded the armed force of three-fourths of Europe, doing battle for the holy alliance of autocrats, for the international law of repression, for all the traditions of the old diplomacy; on the other, the young student with little money and few friends, already an exile, having no allies but his brain and his pen, who set himself, certain of success, to dissolve that mighty array of power and pomp. All his life Charles Albert was a Faust for the possession of whose soul two irreconcilable forces contended; the struggle was never more dramatically represented than at this moment in the person of these two champions.

Mazzini's letter to Charles Albert, which was read by the King, and widely, though secretly, circulated in Piedmont, began by telling him that his fellow-countrymen were ready to believe his line of conduct in 1821 to have been forced on him by circumstances, and that there was not a heart in Italy that did not quicken at his accession, nor an eye in Europe that was not turned to watch his first steps in the career that now unfolded before him. Then he went on to show, with the logical strength in developing an argument which, joined to a novel and eloquent style, caused his writings to attract notice from the first, that the King could take no middle course. He would be one of the first of men, or the last of Italian tyrants; let him choose. Had he never looked upon Italy, radiant with the smile of nature, crowned with twenty centuries of sublime memories, the mother of genius, possessing infinite means, to which only union was lacking, girt round with such defences that a strong will and a few courageous breasts would suffice to defend her? Had it never struck him that she was created for a glorious destiny? Did he not contemplate her people, splendid still, in spite of the shadow of servitude, the vigour of whose intellect, the energy of whose passions, even when turned to evil, showed that the making of a nation was there? Did not the thought come to him: 'Draw a world out of these dispersed elements like a god from chaos; unite into one whole the scattered members, and pronounce the words, "It is mine, and it is happy"?'

Mazzini in 1831 was twenty-six years of age. His father was a Genoese physician, his mother a native of Chiavari. She was a superior woman, and devoted more than a mother's care to the excitable and delicate child, who seemed to her (mothers have sometimes the gift of prophecy) to be meant for an uncommon lot. One of the few personal reminiscences that Mazzini left recorded, relates to the time and manner in which the idea first came to him of the possibility of Italians doing something for their country. He was walking with his mother in the Strada Nuova at Genoa one Sunday in April 1821, when a tall, black-bearded man with a fiery glance held towards them a white handkerchief, saying: 'For the refugees of Italy.' Mazzini's mother, gave him some money, and he passed on. In the streets were many unfamiliar faces; the fugitives from Turin and Alessandria were gathered at Genoa before they departed by sea into exile. The impression which that scene made on the mind of the boy of sixteen was never effaced.

Owing to his delicate health, Mazzini's early education was carried on at home, where the social atmosphere was that of one of those little centres in a provincial capital which are composed of a few people, mostly kindred, of similar tastes, who lead useful and refined lives, content with moderate ease. The real exclusiveness of such centres exceeds any that exists in the most aristocratic sphere in the world. The Mazzinis were, moreover, Genoese to the core; and this was another reason for exclusiveness, and for holding aloof from the governing class. Mazzini was born a few days after Napoleon entered Genoa as its lord. He had not, therefore, breathed the air of the ancient Republic; but there was the unadulterated republicanism of a thousand years in his veins.

When he grew to manhood his appearance was striking. The black, flowing hair, the pale, olive complexion, the finely-cut features and lofty brow, the deep-set eyes, which could smile as only Italian eyes can smile, but which could also flash astral infinitudes of scorn, the fragile figure, even the long, delicate, tapering fingers, marked him for a man apart—though whether a poet or an apostle, a seer or a saint, it was not easy to decide. Yet this could be said at once: if this man concentrated all his being on a single point, he would wield the power, call it what we will, which in every age has worked miracles and moved mountains.

Mazzini became a Carbonaro, though the want of clear, guiding principles in Carbonarism made him misdoubt its efficacy, and its hierarchical mysteries and initiatory ordeals repelled him by their childishness. Then followed his arrest, and his detention in the fortress of Savona, which was the turning-point in his mental life. Before that date he learnt, after it he taught. From his high-perched cell he saw the sea and the sky—with the Alps, the sublimest things in Nature. The voices of the fishermen reached his ears, though he could not see them. A tame goldfinch was his companion. Here, in a solitude and peace which he remembered with regret in the stormy and sorrowful years that were to come, he conceived his message and the mission, in which he believed to the last day of his life.

He resolved to found a new association on broader and simpler lines than the secret societies of the past, which should aim not only at the material freeing of Italy from her present bondage, but at her moral and religious regeneration. To aim at material progress of any kind, without at the same time aiming at a higher moral progress, seemed to Mazzini absurd; to attempt to pull down without attempting to build up seemed to him criminal. Thus he accused the Socialists of substituting the progress of humanity's kitchen for the progress of humanity. He believed that Italy, united and redeemed, was destined to shed through the world the light of a new moral unity, which should end the reign of Scepticism, triumphant among discordant creeds. Mazzini's religious belief was the motor of his whole being. The Catholicism in which he was outwardly brought up never seems to have touched his inner nature; he went through no spiritual wrench in leaving a faith that was never a reality to him. The same is true of innumerable young Italians, who, when they begin to read and study, drift out of their childhood's religion without a struggle or a regret. But thought and study brought Mazzini what it rarely brings to these young men—the necessity to find something in which he could believe. He had not long to seek for a basis to his creed, because he was one of the men from the prophets of old to Spinoza, from Spinoza to Gordon, to whom the existence of God is a matter of experience rather than an object of faith. Starting from this point, he formed his religion out of what he regarded as its inevitable deductions. If God existed, his creatures must be intended for perfection; if this were the Divine scheme, man's one business was to carry it out. He considered the idea of duty separated from the idea of God to be illogical. Either the development of human things depended on a providential law, or it was left to chance and passing circumstance, and to the dexterity of the man who turned these to most account. God was the sole source of duty; duty the sole law of life. Mazzini did not denounce Catholicism or any other religion as false. He saw in it a stepping-stone to purer comprehension, which would be reached when man's intellect was sufficiently developed for him to be able to do without symbols.



The conscience of humanity is the last tribunal. Ideas, as well as institutions, change and expand, but certain fundamental principles are fixed. The family would always exist; property would always exist. The first, 'the heart's fatherland,' was the source of the only true happiness, the only joys untainted by grief, which were given to man. Those who wished to abolish the second were like the savage who cut down the tree in order to gather the fruit. In the future, free association would be the great agent of moral and material progress. The authority which once rested in popes and emperors now devolved on the people. Instead of 'God and the King,' Mazzini proposed the new formula 'God and the People.' By the people he understood no caste or class, whether high or low, but the universality of men composing the nation. The nation is the sole sovereign; its will, expressed by delegates, must be law to all its citizens.

By degrees certain words acquired more and more a mystical significance in Mazzini's mind; the very name of Rome, for instance, had for him a sort of talismanic fascination, not unlike that possessed by Jerusalem for the mediaeval Christian. When he spoke of the people or the republic he frequently used those terms in an ideal and visionary sense (as theologians use the Church) rather than in one strictly corresponding with the case of any existing nation, or any hitherto tried form of government. This does not alter the fact that his theories, which have been briefly summarised, are not hard to comprehend, as has been said by those who did not know in what they consisted, nor, taken one by one, are they novel. What was new in the nineteenth century was the appearance of a revolutionary leader, who was before all things a religious and ethical teacher. And though Mazzini never founded the Church of Precursors, of which he dreamt, his influence was as surely due to his belief in his religious mission, as was the influence of Savonarola. The Italians are not a mystical people, but they have always followed mystical leaders. The less men are prone to ideal enthusiasm the more attracted are they by it; Don Quixote, as Heine remarked, always draws Sancho Panza after him.

Mazzini had a natural capacity for organisation, and the Association of Young Italy which he founded at Marseilles, the first nucleus being a group of young, penniless refugees, soon obtained an astonishing development. Up to the time of his 'Letter to Charles Albert,' his exile had been so far voluntary that he might have remained in Piedmont had he agreed to live in one of the smaller towns under the watchful care of the police, but he declined the terms, and the first effect of the 'Letter' was a stringent order to arrest him if he recrossed the frontier. He was not surprised at that result. Mazzini's attitude towards the Sardinian monarchy was perfectly well defined. Republican himself, even to fanaticism, he placed the question of unity, which for him meant national existence, above the question of the republic. He did not believe that the House of Savoy would unite Italy, but if unity could only be had under what he looked upon as the inauspicious form of monarchy, he would not reject it. He was like the real mother in the judgment of Solomon, who, because she loved her child, was ready to give it up sooner than see it cut in two.

Apart from personal hereditary instincts and predilections, Mazzini thought that he saw in the glorious memories of the Italian republics a clear indication that the commonwealth was the form of government which ought and would be adopted by the Italy of the future. But, unlike most politicians, he laid down the principle that, after all, when free, the nation must decide for itself. 'To what purpose,' he asks, 'do we constantly speak of the sovereignty of the people, and of our reverence for the national will, if we are to disregard it as soon as it pronounces in contradiction to our wishes?'

He did not succeed in making the majority of his countrymen republicans, but he contributed more than any other man towards inspiring the whole country with the desire for unity. Herein lies his great work. Without Mazzini, when would the Italians have got beyond the fallacies of federal republics, leagues of princes, provincial autonomy, insular home-rule, and all the other dreams of independence reft of its only safeguard which possessed the minds of patriots of every party in Italy and of nearly every well-wisher to Italian freedom abroad?

In 1831, most educated Italians did not even wish for unity, and this is still truer of the republicans than of the monarchists. Some, like Manzoni, did wish for it, but, like him, said nothing about it, for fear of being thought madmen. A flash of the true light illuminated the mind of Giro Menotti, but that was extinguished on the scaffold. Then it was that Mazzini came forward with the news that Italy could only be made free and independent by being united; unity was the ruling tendency of the century, and, as far as Italy went, no Utopia, but a certain conclusion. This was repeated over and over again, wherever there were Italians, over the inhabited globe. By means of sailors, 'Young Italy' spread like lightning. Giuseppe Garibaldi was made a member by a sailor on the shores of the Black Sea.

With the masses, unity proved the wonder-working word which Confalonieri had said was the one thing needful—a word yet fitter to work wonders than 'War to the Stranger.' Among the cultivated classes, it was much slower in gaining ground, and particularly among statesmen and diplomatists. But in the end it was to convert them all.

'"Young Italy,"' writes Mazzini, 'closed the period of political sects, and initiated that of educational associations.' 'Great revolutions,' he says again, 'are the work of principles rather than of bayonets.' It was by the diffusion of ideas that 'Young Italy' became a commanding factor in the events of the next thirty years. The insurrectional attempts planned under its guidance did not succeed, nor was it likely that they should succeed. Devised by exiles, at a distance, they lacked the first elements of success. The earliest of these attempts aimed at an invasion of Savoy; it was hoped that the Sardinian army and people would join the little band of exiles in a movement for the liberation of Lombardy. The revolution of 1821 had evidently suggested this plan to Mazzini, but it was foredoomed to misfortune. The Piedmontese authorities got wind of it, and a hunt followed for the members of 'Young Italy'; most severe measures were taken; there were eleven executions, and numberless sentences to long terms of imprisonment. Jacobo Ruffini, the younger brother of the author of Dr Antonio, and Mazzini's most beloved friend, committed suicide in prison, fearing to reveal the names of his associates. The apologists for Charles Albert say that if he had not shown the will and ability to deal severely with the conspirators, Austria would have insisted on a military occupation. Whatever were his motives, this is the saddest page of his unhappy reign.

Checked in 1833, the descent on Savoy was actually attempted in 1834, with Mazzini's consent, though not by his wish. An officer who had won some celebrity in the Polish revolution, General Ramorino, a Savoyard by origin, was given the command. Ramorino was a gambler, who could not be trusted with money, but Mazzini's suspicion that on this occasion he played the part of traitor is not proved. However that may be, the expedition ended almost as soon as it began. Ramorino crossed the frontier of Savoy at the head of the column, but when he heard that a Polish reinforcement had been stopped on the Lake of Geneva, he retreated into Switzerland, and advised the band to follow him.

After these events, Mazzini could no longer carry on his propaganda in France. He took refuge in England, where a great part of his life was to be passed, and of which he spoke, to the last, as his second country. The first period of his residence in England was darkened by the deep distress and discouragement into which the recent events had plunged him; but his faith in the future prevailed, and he went on with his work. His endeavours to help his fellow-exiles reduced him to the last stage of poverty; the day came when he was obliged to pawn a coat and an old pair of boots. These money difficulties did not afflict him, and by degrees his writings in English periodicals brought some addition to the small quarterly allowance which he received from his mother. It seems strange, though it is easily explained, that it was in London that he first got to know the Italian working classes. He was surprised and gladdened by the abundance of good elements which he found in them. No country, indeed, has more reason to hope in her working men than the land whose sons have tunnelled the Alps, cut the most arduous railway lines in America and India, brought up English ships from the deep, laid the caissons (a task of extreme danger) which support the great structure of the Bridge of the Firth of Forth, and left their bones to whiten at Panama. 'It is the universal testimony,' writes a high American authority, 'that no more faithful men have come among us.' What was the cause of the slaughter of the Aigues Mortes? That the Italians worked too well.

Mazzini wrote for his humble friends the treatise on The Duties of Man, in which he told them that he loved them too well to flatter them. Another work that occupied him and consoled him was the rescue and moral improvement of the children employed by organ-grinders, and he was the first to call attention to the white slavery to which many of them were subjected. He opened a school in Hatton Garden, in which he taught, and which he mainly supported for the seven years from 1841 to 1848.

The enterprise of the Brothers Bandiera belongs to the history of 'Young Italy,' though Mazzini himself had tried to prevent it, believing that it could only end in the sacrifice of all concerned. Nor, at the last, did the actors in it expect anything else. They had hoped for better things; for a general movement in the South of Italy, or at least for an undertaking on a larger and less irrational basis. But promises failed, money was not forthcoming, and it was a choice between doing nothing or a piece of heroic folly. Contrary to Mazzini's entreaties, they chose the second alternative.

Attilio and Emilio Bandiera were sons of the Austrian admiral who, in 1831, arrested Italian fugitives at sea. Placed by their father in the Austrian navy, they renounced every prospect of a brilliant career to enter the service of their down-trodden country. When they deserted, strong efforts were made by the Archduke Rainieri, through their mother, to win them back, but neither the offers of pardon nor the poor woman's tears and reproaches turned them from their purpose. Another deserter was with them, Lieutenant Domenico Moro, a youth of great charm of person and disposition, who had been employed with a mixed force of Englishmen and Austrians in the Lebanon, where he formed a warm friendship with Lieutenant, now Admiral, Sir George Wellesley, who still preserves an affectionate remembrance of him. Nicola Ricciotti, a Roman subject who had devoted all his life to Italy, and Anacarsi Nardi, son of the dictator of Modena, were also of the band, which counted about twenty.

The Bandieras and their companions sailed from Corfu for the coast of Calabria on the 11th of June 1844. 'If we fall,' they wrote to Mazzini, 'tell our countrymen to imitate our example, for life was given to us to be nobly and usefully employed, and the cause for which we shall have fought and died is the purest and holiest that ever warmed the heart of man.' It was their last letter. After they landed in Calabria one of their number disappeared; there is every reason to suppose that he went to betray them. They wandered for a few days in the mountains, looking for the insurgent band which they had been falsely told was waiting for them, and then fell into an ambush prepared by the Neapolitan troops. Some died fighting; nine were shot at Cosenza, including the Bandieras, Mori, Ricciotti and Nardi. Boccheciampi the Corsican, whom they suspected of treason, was brought up to be confronted with them during the trial; when asked if he knew who he was, Nardi replied: 'I know no word in my divine Italian language that can fitly describe that man.' Boccheciampi was condemned to a nominal imprisonment; when he came out of prison he wrote to a Greek girl of Corfu, to whom he was engaged, to join him at Naples, that they might be married. The girl had been deeply in love with him, and had already given him part of her dowry, but she answered: 'A traitor cannot wed a Greek maiden; I bear with me the blessing of my parents; upon you rests the curse of God.'

The martyrdom of the Bandieras made a great impression, especially in England, where the circumstance came to light that their correspondence with Mazzini had been tampered with in the English Post Office, and that information as to their plans had reached the Austrian and Neapolitan Governments through the British Foreign Office. The affair was brought before the House of Commons by Thomas Duncombe. The Home Secretary repeated a calumny which had appeared many years before in a French newspaper, to the effect that the murder of an Italian in Rodez by two of his fellow-countrymen was the result of an order from the Association of Young Italy. Sir James Graham had to apologise afterwards for 'the injury inflicted on Mr Mazzini' by this statement, which he was obliged to admit was supported by no evidence, and was contrary to the opinion of the Judge who tried the case.

The Times having observed in a leading article that the gravity of the fact in question, the violation of private correspondence in the Post Office, was not affected by the merits or demerits of Mr Mazzini, of whom it professed to 'know nothing,' Thomas Carlyle wrote next day a letter containing words which may be quoted as some of the best and truest ever written about the great Italian: 'I have had the honour to know Mr Mazzini for a series of years, and, whatever I may think of his practical insight and skill in worldly affairs, I can with great freedom testify that he, if I have ever seen one such, is a man of genius and virtue, one of those rare men, numerable unfortunately but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called martyr souls; who in silence, piously in their daily life, understand and practise what is meant by that.' [2]



CHAPTER V

THE POPE LIBERATOR

1844-1847

Events leading to the Election of Pius IX.—The Petty Princes—Charles Albert, Leopold and Ferdinand.

The day is drawing near when the century which witnessed the liberation of Italy will have passed away. Already a generation has grown up which can but faintly realise the passionate hopes and fears with which the steps that led through defeat to the ultimate victory were watched, not only by Italians, but by thousands who had never set foot in Italy. Never did a series of political events evoke a sympathy so wide and so disinterested, and it may be foretold with confidence that it never will again. Italy rising from the grave was the living romance of myriads of young hearts that were lifted from the common level of trivial interests and selfish ends, from the routine of work or pleasure, both deadening without some diviner spark, by a sustained enthusiasm that can hardly be imagined now. There were, indeed, some who asked what was all this to them? What were the 'extraneous Austrian Emperor,' or the 'old chimera of a Pope' (Carlyle's designations) to the British taxpayer? Some there were in England who were deeply attached still to the 'Great Hinge on which Europe depended,' and even to the most clement Spanish Bourbons of Naples, about whom strangely beautiful things are to be read in old numbers of the Quarterly Review. But on the whole, English men and women—in mind half Italian, whether they will it or not, from the day they begin to read their own literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to Shelley, from Shelley to Rossetti and Swinburne—were united at that time in warmth of feeling towards struggling Italy as they have been united in no political sentiment relating to another nation, and in few concerning their own country.

It would be vain to expect that the record of Italian vicissitudes during the years when the fate of Italy hung in the balance can awake or renew the spellbound interest caused by the events themselves. The reader of recent history is like the novel reader who begins at the last chapter—he is too familiar with how it all ended to be keenly affected by the development of the plot. Yet it is plain that we are in a better position to appreciate the process of development than was the case when the issue remained uncertain. We can estimate more accurately the difficulties which stood in the way, and judge more impartially the means that were taken to remove them. One outcome of this fuller knowledge is the conviction that patriotism was the monopoly of no single Italian party. The leaders, and still more their henchmen, were in the habit of saying very hard things about each other. It was natural and unavoidable; but there is no excuse now for failing to recognise that there were pure and devoted patriots on the one side as well as on the other—men whose only desire was the salvation of Italy, to effect which no sacrifice seemed too great. Nor were their labours unfruitful, for there was work for all of them to do; and the very diversity of opinion, though unfortunate under some aspects, was not so under all. If no one had raised the question of unity before all things, Italy might be still a geographical expression. If no one had tried to wring concessions from the old governments, their inherent and irremediable vices would never have been proved; and though they might have been overturned, they would have left behind a lasting possibility of ignorant reaction.

The Great Powers had presented to the Court of Rome in 1831 a memorandum, in which various moderate reforms and improvements were proposed as urgently necessary to put an end to the intolerable abuses which were rife in the states of the Church, and, most of all, in Romagna. The abolition of the tribunal of the Holy Office, the institution of a Council of State, lay education, and the secularisation of the administration were among the measures recommended. In 1845 a certain Pietro Renzi collected a body of spirited young men at San Marino, and made a dash on Rimini, where he disarmed the small garrison. The other towns were not prepared, and Renzi and his companions were obliged to retire into Tuscany; but the revolution, partial as it had been, raised discussion in consequence of the manifesto issued by its promoters, in which a demand was made for the identical reforms vainly advocated by European diplomacy fourteen years before. If these were granted, the insurgents engaged to lay down their arms. The manifesto was written by Luigi Carlo Farini, who was destined to play a large part in future affairs. It proved to Europe that even the most conservative elements in the nation were driven to revolution by the sheer hopelessness of the dead-lock which the Italian rulers sought by every means to prolong. Massimo d'Azeglio, who was then known only as a painter of talent and a writer of historical novels, first made his mark as a politician by the pamphlet entitled Gli ultimi casi di Romagna, in which his arguments derived force from the fact that, when travelling in the district, he had done all in his power to induce the Liberals to keep within the bounds of legality. But he confessed that, when someone says: 'I suffer too much,' it is an unsatisfactory answer to retort: 'You have not suffered enough.' Massimo d'Azeglio had lived for many years an artist's life in Rome and the country round, where his aristocratic birth and handsome face made him popular with all classes. The transparent integrity of his nature overcame the diffidence usually inspired by strangers among a somewhat suspicious people, and he got to know more thoroughly than any other North Italian the real aspirations of the Pope's subjects. He listened to their complaints and their plans, and if they asked his advice, he invariably replied: 'Let us speak clearly. What is it that you wish and I with you? You wish to have done with priestly rule, and to send the Teutons out of Italy? If you invite them to decamp, they will probably say, "No, thank you!" Therefore you must use force; and where is it to be had? If you have not got it, you must find somebody who has. In Italy who has it, or, to speak more precisely, who has a little of it? Piedmont, because it, at least, enjoys an independent life, and possesses an army and a surplus in the treasury.' His friends answered: 'What of Charles Albert, of 1821, of 1832?' Now, there was no one who felt less trust in Charles Albert than Massimo d'Azeglio; he admitted it with something like remorse in later years. But he believed in his ambition, and he thought it madness to throw away what he regarded as the sole chance of freeing Italy on account of private doubts of the King of Sardinia's sincerity.

Charles Albert had reigned for fourteen years, and still the mystery which surrounded his character formed as impenetrable a veil as ever. The popular nickname of Re Tentenna (King Waverer) seemed, in a sense, accepted by him when he said to the Duke d'Aumale in 1843: 'I am between the dagger of the Carbonari and the chocolate of the Jesuits.' He chose, as bride for his eldest son, an Austrian princess, who, however, had known no country but Italy. His internal policy was not simply stationary, it was retrograde. If his consent was obtained to some progressive measure, he withdrew it at the last moment, or insisted on the introduction of modifications which nullified the whole. His want of stability drove one of his ministers to jump out of a window. In spite of the candid reference to the Jesuit's cup of chocolate, he allowed the Society of Jesus to dictate its will in Piedmont. Victor Amadeus, the first King of Sardinia, took public education out of the hands of the Jesuits, after receiving the following deathbed communication from one of the Order who was his own confessor: 'Deeply sensible of your many favours, I can only show my gratitude by a final piece of advice, but of such importance that perhaps it may suffice to discharge my debt. Never have a Jesuit for confessor. Do not ask me the grounds of this advice, I should not be at liberty to tell them to you.' The lesson was forgotten now. Charles Albert was not content to wear a hair-shirt himself; he would have liked to see all his subjects furnished with the same garment. The result was, that Piedmont was not a comfortable place for Liberals to live in, nor a lively place for anyone. Yet there is hardly anything more certain than that all this time the King was constantly dreaming of turning the Austrians out of Italy. His government kept its attention fixed on two points: the improvement of the army, and the accumulation of a reserve fund to be available in case of war. Drill and thrift, which made the German Empire out of Prussia, if they did not lead straight to equally splendid results south of the Alps, were still what rendered it possible for Piedmont to defy Austria when the time came. In 1840, Charles Albert wrote to his Minister of War: 'It is a fine thing to win twenty battles; as for me, I should be content to win ten on behalf of a cause I know of, and to fall in the tenth—then, indeed, I would die blessing the Lord.' A year or two later, he unearthed and reassumed the ancient motto of the House of Savoy: 'J'attends mon astre.' Nevertheless, to the outward world his intentions remained enigmatical, and it was therefore with extreme surprise that Massimo d'Azeglio (who, on his return from the Roman states, asked permission to inform the King of the impressions made on him by his travels) received the injunction to tell his Liberal friends 'that when the occasion presented itself, his life, the life of his sons, his treasure, and his army would all be spent for the Italian cause.'

The fifteen years' pontificate of Gregory XVI. ended on the 1st June of 1846. In spite of the care taken by those around him to keep the aged pontiff in a fool's paradise with regard to the real state of his dominions, a copy of The Late Events in Romagna fell into his hands, and considerably disturbed his peace of mind. He sent two prelates to look into the condition of the congested provinces, and their tour, though it resulted in nothing else, called forth new protests and supplications from the inhabitants, of which the most noteworthy was an address written by Count Aurelio Saffi, who was destined to pass many honourable years of exile in England. This address attacked the root of the evil in a passage which exposed the unbearable vexations of a government based on espionage. The acknowledged power of an irresponsible police was backed by the secret force of an army of private spies and informers. The sentiment of legality was being stamped out of the public conscience, and with it religion and morality. 'Bishops have been heard to preach civil war—a crusade against the Liberals; priests seem to mix themselves in wretched party strife, egging on the mob to vent its worst passions. There is not a Catholic country in which the really Christian priest is so rarely found as in the States of the Church.'

If Gregory XVI. was not without reasons for disquietude in his last hours, he could take comfort in the fact that he had succeeded in keeping railways out of all parts of his dominions. Gas and suspension bridges were also classed as works of the Evil One, and vigorously tabooed. Among the Pope's subjects there was a young prelate who had never been able to make out what there was subversive to theology in a steam-engine, or why the safety of the Papal government should depend on its opposing every form of material improvement, although in discussing these subjects he generally ended by saying: 'After all I am no politician, and I may be mistaken.' This prelate was Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, Bishop of Imola. Born in 1792 at Sinigaglia, of a good though rather needy family, Count Giovanni Maria Mastai was piously brought up by his mother, who dedicated him at an early age to the Virgin, to whom she believed that she owed his recovery from an illness which had been pronounced fatal. Roman Catholic writers connect the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception with this incident of childhood. After entering the priesthood, young Mastai devoted most of his energies to active charity, and remained, as he said, 'no politician,' being singularly ignorant of the world and of public affairs, though full of amiable wishes that everyone should be happy. Some years spent in missionary work in South America failed to enlarge his practical knowledge, the limits of which he was the first to recognise—a fact that tended to make him all his life the instrument, not of his own will, but of the wills of men whom he honestly thought cleverer and more experienced than himself. His chief friends in his Romagnol diocese, friends on the intimate basis of social equality and common provincial interests, were sound patriots, though not revolutionists, and the future Pio Nono involuntarily adopted their ideas and sympathies. He saw with his eyes certain abuses so glaring that they admitted of no two opinions, and these helped to convince him of the truth of his friends' arguments in favour of a completely new order of things. One such abuse was the encouragement given by government to the Society of the Centurioni, the latest evolution of the Calderai; the Centurions, recruited among roughs and peasants, were set upon the respectable middle classes, over which they tyrannised by secret accusations or open violence: it was well understood that anyone called a Liberal, or Freemason, or Carbonaro could be beaten or killed without inquiries being made.

The Bishop of Imola was frequently in the house of the Count and Countess Pasolini, who kept their friend well supplied with the new books on Italian affairs; thus he read not only D'Azeglio's Cast di Romagna, but also Cesare Balbo's Le Speranze d'Italia, which propounded a plan for an Italian federation, and Gioberti's Primato morale e civile degli Italiani, in which this plan was elaborately developed. Gioberti indicated the Supreme Pontiff as the natural head of the Italian Union, and the King of Sardinia as Italy's natural deliverer from foreign domination. The eternal fitness of things, and the history of many centuries, proved the Pope to be the proper paramount civil authority in Italy, 'which is the capital of Europe, because Rome is the religious metropolis of the world.' An ex-member of 'Young Italy,' a Piedmontese by birth, a priest by ordination, Gioberti's profession of faith was derived from these three sources, and it attracted thousands of Italians by its apparent reconciliation of the interests of the papacy, and of the Sardinian monarchy, with the most advanced views of the newest school. History, to which Gioberti appealed, might have told him that a reversal of the law of gravity was as likely to happen as the performance by the papacy of the mission he proposed to it; but men believe what they wish to believe, and his work found, as has been said, thousands of admirers, among whom none was more sincere than Cardinal Mastai. The day on which Count Pasolini gave him a copy of Il Primato he created that great, and under some aspects pathetic illusion, the reforming Pope.

The Conclave opened on the 14th of June 1846. During the Bishop of Imola's journey to Rome a white pigeon had perched several times on his carriage. The story became known; people said the same thing had occurred to a coming Pope on former occasions, and the augury was accepted with joy and satisfaction. He was, in fact, elected after the Conclave had lasted only two days, while the Conclave which elected his predecessor lasted sixty-four. The brevity of that to which Pius IX. owed the tiara was looked upon by the populace as something miraculous, but it was the result of the well-considered determination of the Italian Cardinals not to allow time for Austrian intrigues to obtain the election of a Pope who would be ruled from Vienna. When the new Pope appeared on the balcony of the Quirinal to give his first benediction, the people, carried away by his youthful yet majestic bearing, and by the hopes which already centred in him, broke into frantic cries of: 'We have a Pope! He loves us! He is our Father!' If they had cried: 'We have a new heaven and a new earth,' they would but have expressed the delirium which, starting from Rome, spread throughout Italy.

On the night of the 6th of December 1846, the whole line of the Apennines from Liguria to Calabria was illuminated. A hundred years before, a stone thrown by the child Balilla had given the signal for the expulsion of the Austrians from Genoa: this was the memory flashed from height to height by countless beacons, but while celebrating the past, they were the fiery heralds of a greater revolution.

The upheaval of Europe did not become a fact, however, for another year. Meantime, the Roman States attracted more attention than any other part of the peninsula, from the curiosity awakened by the progress of the experiment of which they were the scene. It is not doubtful that at the first moment Pius IX. was under the impression that the problem he had taken in hand was eminently simple. A little goodwill on the part of everybody, an amnesty to heal old sores, and a few administrative reforms, ought, he thought, to set everything right. Such was not the opinion of intelligent onlookers who were students of politics—especially if they were foreigners, and could therefore keep their heads moderately cool in the prevailing excitement. The wave of a wand may seem to effect marvels, but long and silent causes prepare the way for each event. Now what had been going on for years in the Roman States was not the process of gradual growth, but the process of rapid disintegration. The Temporal Power of the Popes had died without anyone noticing it, and there was nothing left but a body in the course of dissolution. Every foreigner in Rome during the reign of Gregory XVI. bore witness that his government depended for its existence absolutely on the Swiss Guards. In 1845, Count Rossi told Guizot that without the Swiss regiments the government in the Legations and the Marches 'would be overthrown in the twinkling of an eye.' The British agent in Rome, writing during the Conclave, bore this out by the statement, which applied not to one portion of the Roman states, but to all, that 'the government could not stand without the protection of Austria and the immediate presence of the Swiss.' On the accession of Pius IX., the props, such as they were, which had prevented an earlier collapse of the Temporal Power, were either removed or rendered useless. The Swiss might as well have been disbanded at once as retained merely to be a bone of contention between the new government and the people, since it was understood that a vigorous use of their services would never be resorted to; while Austrian protection was transferred from the Pope to the disaffected party in the Church, which consisted in a large proportion of the cardinals and of the inferior clergy who were afraid that, with the reform of abuses, they would lose their influence over the lower class of their flocks. The English diplomatic agents in Italy also firmly believed that Austria coupled with her support of the ultramontane malcontents the direct encouragement of the disorderly elements of the population. To resist all these contrary forces, Pius IX. had only a popularity which, though for the time immense, was founded almost completely on imagination. 'It was,' said Mr Petre, 'the name and known views of Pius, rather than his acts, which aroused so much interest.' If for 'known views' be substituted 'supposed views,' the remark exactly describes the situation.

Popularity is very well, but a government cannot long subsist on the single fact of the popularity of the sovereign. When the Roman mob began to cry: 'Viva Pio Nono solo,' the fate of the experiment was sealed. Real control slipped from the hands that nominally wielded it. 'The influence,' Mr Petre wrote to Sir George Hamilton, 'of one individual of the lower class, Angelo Brunetti, hardly known but by his nickname of Ciceruacchio, has for the last month kept the peace of the city more than any power possessed by the authorities, from the command which he exerts over the populace.' It was Ciceruacchio who preserved order when in July 1847 the air was full of rumours of a vast reactionary plot, which aimed at carrying off the Pope, and putting things back as they were under Gregory. That such a plot was ever conceived, or, at anyrate, that it received the sanction of the high personages whose names were mentioned in connection with it, is generally doubted now; but it was believed in by many of the representatives of foreign Powers then in Italy. The public mind in Rome was violently disturbed. Austria made the excitement the excuse for occupying the town of Ferrara, where, by the accepted interpretation of the Treaty of Vienna, she had only the right to garrison the fortress. This aggression called forth a strong remonstrance from the Pope's Secretary of State, Cardinal Ferretti; and though a compromise was arrived at through the mediation of Lord Palmerston, the feeling against Austria grew more and more exasperated in the Roman states, and the Pope consented, not, it seemed, much against the grain, to preparations being taken in hand with a view to the possible eventuality of war.

At this date the Italian question was better apprehended at Vienna than in any other part of Europe. A man of Prince Metternich's talents does not devote a long life to statecraft without learning to distinguish the real drift of political currents. While Lord Palmerston still felt sure that reforms, and nothing but reforms, were what Italy wanted, Prince Metternich saw that two real forces were at work from the Alps to the Straits of Messina, and two only: desire for union, hatred of Austria. Nor was it his fault if the English Cabinet or the rest of the world remained unenlightened. Besides enlarging on this truth in frequent diplomatic communications, he caused it to be continually dwelt upon in the Vienna Observer, the organ of the Austrian Government, which printed illustrative quotations from the writings of Mazzini, of whom it said that 'he has the one merit of despising hypocrisy, and proceeding firmly and directly to his true end. Persons who are versed in history will know that this is exactly the same end as that at which Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzi formerly aimed. The only difference is, that the revolutionary dream has in the course of centuries gained in self-reliance and confidence.' It may truly be affirmed after this that Metternich 'had the one merit of despising hypocrisy.' Exactly the same end as Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzi—who better could have described the scheme of Italian redemption?

In the course of the summer of 1847, the Prince said more than once to the British Ambassador: 'The Emperor is determined not to lose his Italian dominions.' It was no idle boast, the speaker felt confident, that the troops in Lombardy and Venetia could keep those provinces from taking an active part in the 'revolution' which he declared to be already complete over all central Italy, though the word revolution had never yet been mentioned. Nor was it only in the Austrian army that he trusted; Metternich was persuaded that neither in Lombardy nor in Venetia was there any fear of a really popular and, therefore, formidable movement. He believed that Austria's only enemy was the aristocracy. He even threw out hints that if the Austrian Government condescended to do so, it could raise a social or peasants' war of the country people against their masters. This is the policy which has been elaborately followed by the Russians in Poland. The Austrians pointed to their virtue in not resorting to it; but some tentative experiments in such a direction had not given results of a kind to encourage them to go on. The Italian peasant, though ignorant, had a far quicker innate intelligence than his unfortunate Polish brother. He did not dislike his masters, who treated him at least with easy familiarity, and he detested foreigners—those foreigners, no matter of what nation, who for two thousand years had brought the everlasting curse of war upon his fields. The conscription, which carried off his sons for eight years into distant lands, of which he could not pronounce the name, was alone enough to alienate him from the Austrian Government. In hoping to find a friend in the Italian peasant, Metternich reckoned without his host. On the other hand, he was strictly correct in his estimate of the patriotism of the aristocracy. The fact always seemed to the Prince a violation of eternal laws. According to him, the fore-ordained disaffected in every country were drawn from the middle classes. What business had noblemen with ancient names and fine estates to prefer Spielberg to their beautiful palaces and fairy-like villas on the Lombard lakes? Was it on purpose to spite the best of governments, and the one most favourable to the aristocratic principle, which had always held out paternal hands to them? Could anything be imagined more aggravating?

This feature in Italian liberation has been kept mostly in the background. Democratic chroniclers were satisfied to ignore it, and to the men themselves their enormous sacrifices seemed so natural that they were very willing to let them pass out of mind. It is in the works of those who, while sympathising with Italy, are not Italians, that the best record of it is to be found; nowhere better than in a recent book by a French writer, M. Paul Bourget, in which occurs the following just and eloquent tribute: 'We must say in praise of the aristocracy on this side of the Alps that the best soldiers of independence were nobles. If Italy owes the final success to the superior capabilities of Victor Emmanuel and Cavour, and to the agitating power of the General of the Thousand, it is well not to forget the struggles sustained for years by gentlemen whose example did so much to raise partisans among the humble. These aristocrats, passionate for liberty, have (like our own of the eighteenth century) done more for the people than the people itself. The veritable history of this Risorgimento would be in great part that of the Italian nobility in which the heroic blood of feudal chiefs revolted against the oppressions and, above all, the perpetual humiliation, born of the presence of the stranger.'

When Prince Metternich looked beyond the borders of those provinces which he said that his Sovereign did not intend to lose, he saw sooner than most people that a ball was set rolling which would not stop half way down the hill. The one element in the situation which came as a surprise to him, was that introduced by Pius IX. 'A liberal Pope is an impossible being!' he exclaimed. Nevertheless this impossible being was a reality which had to be dealt with. He hoped all along, however, that Pius would fall a victim to the Frankenstein he had called into existence, and his only real anxiety lay where it had always lain—on the side of Piedmont. 'Charles Albert ought to let us know,' he wrote to the Austrian Minister at Turin, 'whether his reign has been only a mask under which was hidden the Prince of Carignano, who ascended the throne through the order of succession re-established in his favour by the Emperor Francis.' Considering all things, the endeavour to make it appear that the King was indebted for his crown to Austria was somewhat venturesome. Charles Albert, Metternich went on to say, had to choose between two systems, the system now in force, or 'the crassest revolution.' He wrote again: 'The King is sliding back upon the path which he enters for the second time in his life, and which he will never really quit.' Words of a bitter enemy, but juster than the 'Esecrato o Carignano,' hurled for a quarter of a century at Charles Albert by those who only saw in him a traitor.

The constant invocation of the revolutionary spectre by the Austrian statesman convinced the King that the wish was father to the thought, and, afraid of introducing the thin end of the wedge, he showed himself more than ever averse to reforming the antiquated machinery of the Sardinian Government. Instead of being the first of Italian princes to yield to popular demands, he was almost the last. He believed that the question of nationality, of independence, could be separated from the question of free institutions. Of all the chimerical ideas then afloat, this was the most chimerical. Even the example of the Pope, for whom Charles Albert felt a romantic devotion, was not enough to induce him to open the road to reforms. The person who seems first to have impressed him with their absolute necessity was Lord Minto, whose visit to Turin, in October 1847, coincided with the dismissal of Count della Margherita, the minister most closely associated with the absolutist and Jesuitical regime. Lord Minto was sent to Italy to encourage in the ways of political virtue those Italian princes who were not entirely incorrigible. His mission excited exaggerated hopes on the part of the Liberals, and exaggerated wrath in the retrograde party—both failing to understand its limitations. The hopes died a natural death, but long afterwards, reactionary writers attributed all the 'troubles' in Italy to this estimable British diplomatist. What is not doubtful is, that, accustomed as they were to being lectured and bullied by foreign courts, the Italians derived the greatest encouragement from the openly expressed sympathy of well-known English visitors, whether they came in an official capacity like Lord Minto, or unofficially like Mr Cobden, who travelled as a missionary of Free Trade, and was received with rapture—with which, it is to be feared, Free Trade had little to do—by the leading Liberals in Italy: Massimo d'Azeglio at Genoa, Mancini at Naples Cavour and Scialoja at Turin, Minghetti at Bologna, Ridolfi at Florence, and Manin and Tommaseo at Venice.

Towards the end of 1847, there was a curious shuffling of the cards in the small states of Lucca and Parma, resulting in much irritation, which, in an atmosphere so charged with revolutionary electricity, was not without importance. The dissolute Bourbon prince who reigned in Lucca, Charles Ludovico, had but one desire, which was to increase his civil list. He hit upon an English jockey named Ward, who came to Italy in the service of a German count, and this person he made his Chancellor of the Exchequer. By various luminous strokes, Ward furthered his Sovereign's object without much increasing the taxation, and when matters began to grow complicated, and here, too, a cry was raised for a Constitution (which had been solemnly guaranteed to the people of Lucca at the Congress of Vienna, but had never been heard of since), he proposed the sale of the Duchy off-hand to Tuscany, with which it would, in any case, be united, when, on the death of the ex-Empress Marie-Louise, the Duchy of Parma devolved on the Duke of Lucca. At the same time, by a prior agreement, a district of Tuscany called the Lunigiana was consigned, one-half to the Duchess of Parma, and the other to the Duke of Modena. The indignation of the population, which was made, by force, subject to the Duke of Modena, was intense, and the whole transaction of handing about Italians to suit the pleasure of princes, or to obey the articles of forgotten treaties, reminded the least sensitive of the everyday opprobrium of their lot.

The bargain with Tuscany had been struck only eight days when Marie-Louise died—unlamented, since the latter years of her reign formed a sad contrast to the earlier. Marie-Louise had not a bad disposition, but she always let her husband of the hour govern as he chose; of the four or five of these husbands, the last two, and particularly the hated Count de Bombelles, undid all the good done by their more humane predecessors. The Parmese petitioned their new Duke to send the man away, and to grant them some measure of freedom. The answer he gave was the confirmation of Bombelles in all his honours, and the conclusion of a treaty with Austria, securing the assistance of her arms. A military force had been sent to Parma to escort the body of the late Duchess to Vienna; but on the principle that the living are of more consequence than the dead, it remained there to protect the new Duke from his subjects. Marie-Louise and her lovers, Charles Ludovico and his jockey-minister, are instructive illustrations of the scandalous point things had reached in the small states of Italy.

There was, indeed, one state in which, though the dynasty was Austrian, the government was conducted without ferocity and without scandal. This was Tuscany. The branch of the Hapsburg-Lorraine family established in Tuscany produced a series of rulers who, if they exhibited no magnificent qualities, were respectable as individuals, and mild as rulers. Giusti dubbed Leopold II. 'the Tuscan Morpheus, crowned with poppies and lettuce leaves,' and the clear intelligence of Ricasoli was angered by the languid, let-be policy of the Grand-Ducal government, but, compared with the other populations of Italy, the Tuscans might well deem themselves fortunate. Only on one occasion had the Grand Duke given up a fugitive from the more favoured provinces, and the presence of distinguished exiles lent brilliancy to his capital. Leopold II. hesitated between the desire to please his subjects and the fear of his Viennese relations, who sent him through Metternich the ominous reminder, 'that the Italian Governments had only subsisted for the last ten years by the support they received from Austria'—an assertion at which Charles Albert took umbrage, but he was curtly told that he was not intended. In spite of his fears, however, the Grand Duke instituted a National Guard on the 4th of September, which was correctly judged the augury of further concessions. In August, the Austrian Minister had distinctly threatened to occupy Tuscany, or any other of the Italian duchies where a National Guard was granted; its institution was therefore interpreted as a decisive act of rebellion against the Imperial dictatorship. The red, white and green tricolor, not yet permitted in Piedmont, floated already from all the towers of the city on the Arno.

Where there were no signs of improvement was in the government of the Two Sicilies. King Ferdinand undertook a journey through several parts of the country, but as Lord Napier, the British Minister, expressed it: 'Exactly where the grace of the royal countenance was principally conferred, the rebels sprung up most thickly.' A revolution was planned to break out in all the cities of the kingdom, but the project only took effect at Messina and at Reggio, and in both places the movement was stifled with prompt and barbarous severity. When the leader of the Calabrian attempt, Domenico Romeo, a landed proprietor, was caught on the heights of Aspromonte, his captors, after cutting off his head, carried it to his young nephew, whom they ordered to take it to Reggio with the cry of 'Long live the King.' The youth refused, and was immediately killed. In the capital, Carlo Poerio and many patriots were thrown into prison on suspicion. Settembrini had just time to escape to Malta.

The year 1847 closed amid outward appearances of quiet.



CHAPTER VI

THE YEAR OF REVOLUTION

1848

Insurrection in Sicily—The Austrians expelled from Milan and Venice—Charles Albert takes the Field—Withdrawal of the Pope and King of Naples—Piedmont defeated—The Retreat.

On the 12th of January, the birthday of the King of the Two Sicilies, another insurrection broke out in Sicily; this time it was serious indeed. The City of the Vespers lit the torch which set Europe on fire.

So began the year of revolution which was to see the kings of the earth flying, with or without umbrellas, and the principle of monarchy more shaken by the royal see-saw of submission and vengeance than ever it was by the block of Whitehall or the guillotine of the Place Louis XV.

In Italy, the errors and follies of that year were not confined to princes and governments, but it will remain memorable as the time when the Italian nation, not a dreamer here or there, or a handful of heroic madmen, or an isolated city, but the nation as a whole, with an unanimity new in history, asserted its right and its resolve to exist.

King Ferdinand sent 5000 soldiers to 'make a garden,' as he described it, of Palermo, if the offers sent at the same time failed to pacify the inhabitants. These offers were refused with the comment: 'Too late,' and the Palermitans prepared to resist to the death under the guidance of the veteran patriot Ruggiero Settimo, Prince of Fitalia. 'Separation,' they said, 'or our English Constitution of 1812.' Increased irritation was awakened by the discovery in the head office of the police at Palermo of a secret room full of skeletons, which were supposed to belong to persons privately murdered. The Neapolitans were compelled to withdraw with a loss of 3000 men, but before they went, the general in command let out 4000 convicts, who had been kept without food for forty-eight hours. The convicts, however, did not fulfil the intentions of their liberator, and did but little mischief. Not so the Neapolitan troops, who committed horrors on the peasantry as they retreated, which provoked acts of retaliation almost as barbarous. In a short time all Sicily was in its own hands except the citadel of Messina.

It is not possible to follow the Sicilians in their long struggle for their autonomy. They stood out for some fourteen months. An English Blue-book is full of the interminable negotiations conducted by Lord Napier and the Earl of Minto in the hope of bringing the strife to an end. When the parliament summoned by the revolutionary government declared the downfall of the House of Bourbon, all the stray princes in Europe, including Louis Napoleon, were reviewed as candidates for the throne. The choice fell on the Duke of Genoa; it was well received in England, and the British men-of-war were immediately ordered to salute the Sicilian flag. But the Duke's reign never became a reality. After an heroic struggle, the islanders were subjugated in the spring of 1849.

So stout a fight for independence must win admiration, if not approval. The political reasons against the course taken by the Sicilians have been suggested in a former chapter. In separating their lot from that of Naples, in rejecting even freedom unless it was accompanied by disruption, they hastened the ruin of the Neapolitans and of themselves, and surely played into the hands of the crafty tyrant who desired nothing better than to fish in the troubled waters of his subjects' dissensions.

In the gathering storm of January 1848, the first idea that occurred to Ferdinand II. was the good old plan of calling in Austrian assistance. But the Austrians were told by Pius IX. that he would not allow their troops to pass through his territory. Had they attempted to pass in spite of his warning, events would have taken a different turn, as the Pope would have been driven into a war with Austria then and there; perhaps he would have been glad, as weak people commonly are, of the compulsion to do what he dared not do without compulsion. The Austrian Government was too wise to force a quarrel; it was easy to lock up Austrian subjects for crying 'Viva Pio Nono,' but the enormous importance of keeping the Head of the Church, if possible, in a neutral attitude could not be overlooked. All thoughts of going to Ferdinand's help were politely abandoned, and he, seeing himself in a defenceless position, and pondering deeply on the upsetting of Louis Philippe's throne, which was just then the latest news, decided on that device, dear to all political conjurors, which is known as taking the wind out of your enemy's sails. The Pope, the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the King of Sardinia, had worried him for six months with admonitions. 'Very well,' he now said; 'they urge me forward, I will precipitate them.' Constitution, representative government, unbridled liberty of the press, a civic guard, the expulsion of the Jesuits; what mattered a trifle more or less when everything could be revoked at the small expense of perjury? Ferdinand posed to perfection in the character of Citizen King. He reassured those who ventured to show the least signs of apprehension by saying: 'If I had not intended to carry out the Statute, I should not have granted it.'

Not many days later, the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the King of Sardinia each promulgated a Charter. In the case of Charles Albert, it had been formally promised on the 8th of February, after sleepless nights, severe fasts, much searching of the heart—contrasting strangely with the gay transformation scene at Naples; but promises have a more serious meaning to some persons than to others. Nor did Charles Albert take any pleasure in the shouts of a grateful people. 'Born in revolution,' he once wrote, 'I have traversed all its phases, and I know well enough what popularity is worth—viva to-day, morte to-morrow.'

In the Lombardo-Venetian provinces all seemed still quiet, but the brooding discontent of the masses increased with the increasing aggressiveness of the Austrian soldiers, while the refusal to grant the studiously moderate demands of men like Nazari of Bergamo and Manin and Tommasco of Venice, who were engaged in a campaign of legal agitation, brought conviction to the most cautious that no measure of political liberty was obtainable under Austrian rule.

At the Scala Theatre some of the audience had raised cries of 'Viva Pio Nono' during a performance of I Lombardi.[3] This was the excuse for prohibiting every direct or indirect public reference to the reigning Pontiff. Nevertheless, a few young men were caught singing the Pope's hymn, upon which the military charged the crowd. On the 3rd of January the soldiers fell on the people in the Piazza San Carlo, killing six and wounding fifty-three. The parish priest of the Duomo said that he had seen Russians, French and Austrians enter Milan as invaders; but a scene like that of the 3rd of January he had never witnessed; 'they simply murdered in the streets.'

The Judicium Statuarium, equivalent to martial law, was proclaimed in February; but the Viennese revolution of the 8th of March, and Prince Metternich's flight to England, were followed by promises to abolish the censure, and to convoke the central congregations of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom. The utmost privilege of these assemblies was consultative. In 1815 they were invested with the right to 'make known grievances,' but they had only once managed to perform this modest function. It was hardly worth while to talk about them on the 18th of March 1848.

On the morning of that day, Count O'Donnel, the Vice-Governor of Milan, announced the Emperor's concessions. Before night he was the hostage of the revolution, signing whatever decrees were demanded of him till in a few hours even his signature was dispensed with. The Milanese had begun their historic struggle.

Taking refuge in the Citadel, Radetsky wrote to the Podesta, Count Gabrio Casati (brother of Teresa Confalonieri), that he acknowledged no authority at Milan except his own and that of his soldiers. Those who resisted would be guilty of high treason. If arguments did not avail, he would make use of all the means placed in his hands by an army of 100,000 men to bring the rebel city to obedience. Unhappily for Radetsky, there were not any such 100,000 men in Italy, though long before this he had told Metternich that he could not guarantee the safety of Lombardy with less than 150,000. In spite of partial reinforcements, the number did not amount to more than from 72,000 to 75,000, while at Milan it stood at between 15,000 and 20,000. But if we take the lower estimate, 15,000 regular troops under such a commander, who, most rare in similar emergencies, knew his own mind, and had no thought except the recovery of the town for his Sovereign, constituted a formidable force against a civilian population, which began the fight with only a few hundred fowling-pieces. The odds on the side of Austria were tremendous.

If the Milan revolt had been one of the customary revolutions, arranged with the help of pen and paper, its first day would have been certainly its last. But even more than the Sicilian Vespers, it was the unpremeditated, irresistible act of a people sick of being slaves. At the beginning Casati tried to restrain it; so, with equal or still stronger endeavours, did the republican Carlo Cattaneo, whose influence was great. 'You have no arms,' he said again and again. Not a single man of weight took upon himself the awful responsibility of urging the unarmed masses upon so desperate an enterprise; but when the die was cast none held back. Initiated by the populace, the revolt was led to its victorious close by the nerve and ability of the influential men who directed its course.

Towards nightfall on the 18th, during which day there had been only scuffles between the soldiers and the people, Radetsky took the Broletto, where the Municipality sat, after a two hours' siege, and sent forthwith a special messenger to the Emperor with the news that the revolution was on a fair way to being completely crushed. Meanwhile, he massed his troops at all the entrances to the city, so that at dawn he might strangle the insurrection by a concentric movement, as in a noose. The plan was good; but to-morrow does not belong even to the most experienced of Field-Marshals.

In all quarters of the city barricades sprang up like mushrooms. Everything went, freely given, to their construction; the benches of the Scala, the beds of the young seminarists, the court carriages, found hidden in a disused church, building materials of the half-finished Palazzo d'Adda, grand pianofortes, valuable pieces of artistic furniture, and the old kitchen table of the artisan. Before the end of the fight the barricades numbered 1523. Young nobles, dressed in the velvet suits then in vogue, cooks in their white aprons, even women and children, rushed to the defence of the improvised fortifications. Luciano Manara and other heroes, who afterwards fell at Rome, were there to lead. In the first straits for want of arms the museums of the Uboldi and Poldi-Pozzoli families were emptied of their rare treasures by permission of the owners; the crowd brandished priceless old swords and specimens of early firearms. More serviceable weapons were obtained by degrees from the Austrian killed and wounded, and from the public offices which fell into their hands. Bolza, long the hated agent of the Austrian police, was discovered by the people, but they did not harm him. Throughout the five days, the Milanese showed a forbearance which was the more admirable, because there can be no doubt that when the Austrians found they were getting the worst of it, they vented their rage in deplorable outrages on non-combatants. That Radetsky was personally to blame for these excesses has never been alleged, and it was perhaps beyond the power of the officers to keep discipline among soldiers who, towards the end, were wild with panic.

'The very foundations of the city were torn up,' wrote the Field-Marshal in his official report; 'not hundreds, but thousands of barricades crossed the streets. Such circumspection and audacity were displayed that it was evident military leaders were at the head of the people. The character of the Milanese had become quite changed. Fanaticism had seized every rank and age and both sexes.'

As always happens with street-fighting, the number of the slain has never been really known; the loss of the citizens was small compared with that of the Austrians, who, according to some authorities, lost 5000, between killed and wounded.

Radetsky ordered the evacuation of the town and citadel on the night of Wednesday, the 22nd of March. The Milanese had won much more than freedom—they had won the right to it. And what they had done they had done alone. When the news that the capital was up in arms spread through Lombardy, there was but one gallant impulse, to fly to its aid. But the earliest to arrive, Giuseppe Martinengo Cesaresco, with his troop of Brescian peasants, found when he reached Milan that they were a few hours too late to share in the last shots fired upon the retreating Austrians.

Nowhere, except in Milan, did the revolution meet with a Radetsky. The Austrian authorities became convinced that their position was untenable, and they desired to avoid a useless sacrifice of life. This, rather than cowardly fears, was the motive which induced Count Palffy and Count Zichy, the civil and military governors of Venice, to yield the city without deluging it in blood. The latter had been guilty of negligence in leaving the Venetian arsenal in charge of troops so untrustworthy that Manin could take it on the 22nd of March by a simple display of his own courage, and without striking a blow, but after this first success on the side of the revolution, which supplied the people with an unlimited stock of arms and ammunition, the Austrians did well to give way even from their own point of view. At seven o'clock on the evening of the 22nd of March, the famous capitulation was signed. Manin's prediction of the previous day, 'To-morrow the city will be in my power, or I shall be dead,' had been realised in the first alternative.

Daniel Manin, who was now forty-four years of age, was by profession a lawyer, by race a Jew. His father became a Christian, and, according to custom, took the surname of his godfather, who belonged to the family of the last Doge of Venice. Manin and the Dalmatian scholar, Niccolo Tommaseo, had been engaged in patiently adducing proof after proof that Austria did not even abide by her own laws when the expression of political opinion was concerned. At the beginning of the revolution they were in prison, and Palffy's first act of surrender was to set them free. Henceforth Manin was undisputed lord of the city. It is strange how, all at once, a man who was only slightly known to the world should have been chosen as spokesman and ruler. It did not, however, happen by chance. The people in Italy are observant; the Venetians had observed Manin, and they trusted him. The power of inspiring trust was what gave this Jewish lawyer his ascendancy, not the talents which usually appeal to the masses. He had not the advantage of an imposing presence, for he was short, slight, with blue eyes and bushy hair; in all things he was the opposite to a demagogue; he never beguiled, or flattered, or told others what he did not believe himself. But, on his side, he knew the people, whom most revolutionary leaders know not at all. 'That is my sole merit,' he used to say. It was that which enabled him to cleanse Venice from the stain of having bartered her freedom for the smile of a conqueror, and give her back the name and inheritance of 'eldest child of liberty.'

It was a matter of course that emancipated Venice should assume a republican form of government. Here the republic was a restoration. At Milan the case was different; there were two parties, that of Cattaneo, which was strongly republican, that of Casati, which was strongly monarchical. There was a third party, which thought of nothing except of never again seeing a soldier with a white coat. By mutual agreement, the Provisional Government declared that the decision as to the form of government should be left to calmer days. For a time this compromise produced satisfactory results.

The revolution gained ground. Francis of Modena executed a rapid flight, and the Duke of Parma presently followed him. By the end of March, Lombardy and Venetia were free, saving the fortresses of the Quadrilateral. The exception was of far greater moment than, in the enchantment of the hour, anyone dreamt of confessing. Mantua, Legnano, Peschiera and Verona were so many cities of refuge to the flying Austrian troops, where they could rest in safety and nurse their strength. Still, the results achieved were great, almost incredible; with the expectation that Rome, Naples, Tuscany and Piedmont would send their armies to consolidate the work already done, it was natural to think that, whatever else might happen, Austrian dominion was a thing of the past. Alessandro Bixio (brother of the General), who was a naturalised Frenchman, wrote to the French Government on the 7th of April from Turin: 'In the ministries, in meetings, in the streets, you only see and hear people to whom the question of Italian independence seems to be one of those historical questions about which the time is past for talking. According to the general opinion, Austria is nothing but a phantom, and the army of Radetsky a shadow.' Such were the hopes that prevailed. They were vain, but they did not appear so then.

Pius IX. seemed to throw in his lot definitely with the revolution when, on the 19th of March, he too granted a Constitution, having previously formed a lay ministry, which included Marco Minghetti and Count Pasolini, under the presidency of Cardinal Antonelli, who thus makes his first appearance as Liberal Premier. That the Roman Constitution was an unworkable attempt to reconcile lay and ecclesiastical pretensions, that the proposed Chamber of Deputies, which was not to make laws affecting education, religious corporations, the registration of births and marriages; or to confer civil rights on non-catholics, or to touch the privileges and immunities of the clergy, might have suited Cloud-cuckoo-town, but would not suit the solid earth, were facts easy to recognise, but no one had time to pause and consider. It was sufficient to hear Pius proclaim that in the wind which was uprooting oaks and cedars might be clearly distinguished the Voice of the Lord. Such utterances, mingled with blessings on Italy, brought balm to patriotic souls. The Liberals had no fear that the Pope would veto the participation of his troops in the national war, for they were blind to the complications with which a fighting Pope would find himself embarrassed in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the other party discerned these complications from the first, and knew what use to make of them.

The powers of reaction had only to catch hold of a perfectly modern sentiment, the doctrine that ecclesiastics should be men of peace, in order to dissipate the myth of a Pope liberator. It was beside the question that, from the moment he accepted such a doctrine, the Pope condemned the institution of prince-bishoprics, of which he represented the last survival. Nor was it material that, if he adopted it, consistency should have made him carry it to its logical consequence of non-resistance. By aid of this theory of a peaceful Pontiff, with the threat, in reserve, of a schism, Austria felt confident that she could avoid the enormous moral inconvenience of a Pope in arms against her.